Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome by George E. Demacopoulos (review)

By anyone’s account Gregory the Great is a seminal figure in Christian history. Straddling the fence between the late antique/patristic world and the early Middle Ages, Gregory is either the last great (pun intended!) early church father or the first great medieval theologian. Both perspectives are accurate and defensible, and George Demacopoulos tells us why and much more.

Good studies of Gregory appear with some regularity, but not so frequently that one is wont to get lost in a sea of monographs and articles à la Augustine of Hippo, for example. Demacopoulos is to be commended for providing such an inviting and readable study of Gregory. As with any ecclesiastical person of note, there is always too much to discuss, but Demacopoulos does a fine job, most of the time, of providing sufficient detail to make his point while inviting the reader to go deeper should she desire to do so. Fourteen chapters, none more than sixteen pages long and many of them only about eight pages long, constitute this book’s core. They are arranged into three parts: Gregory as Ascetic Theologian, Gregory as Pastoral Theologian, and Gregory as “First Man” of Rome.

Throughout the volume Demacopoulos employs a particular hermeneutical grid, developed here in Chapter 1 but also in his doctoral thesis on Gregory and in the chapter devoted to Gregory in his previous volume, Five Models of Spiritual Direction (Notre Dame 2007). This hermeneutical grid is rooted in Greg-ory’s ascetic theology, especially the pontiff’s conviction that proper asceticism will always emphasize service to others. Gregory did not live in the tension that his “worldly” responsibilities drew him away from his monastic, ascetic practices. Instead, he believed that his asceticism was essential to his role as theologian and bishop of Rome. Demacopoulos rightly notes that to delineate Gregory’s theological outlook as ascetic is not novel; what Demacopoulos thinks is unique in Gregory is his outward-looking and others-facing asceticism. The ascetic is not alone with the Alone but lives ascetically so as to serve others. This insight is the most original contribution of the book and provides the hermeneutical axis on which the book turns.

In general Demacopoulos is a charitable reader of Gregory, perhaps too charitable at times. In a well-known passage Gregory exclaims that “the only good Lombard is a dead Lombard.” For Demacopoulos it is possible that this passage is not what it appears to be—an insult—but rather a rhetorical “punch toward the imperial court and its policies (e.g., its failure to protect Rome and its unwillingness to follow Gregory’s lead in ecclesial matters) rather than the Lombards themselves” (95). This, of course, is possible. Gregory regularly employs rhetorical strategies, often to great effect. But is it not possible that the saintly Gregory may have actually disliked the Lombards to such an extent that he allowed himself to say something as scandalous and uncharitable as this? Could he have simply dropped his guard for a moment, perhaps even repenting afterwards? I do not claim that Demacopoulos is wrong, he may know better than I, but the brevity of the book’s chapters sometimes leaves the reader wondering if something more could/should have been said.

The same is true of Demacopoulos’s treatment of Francis Clark’s argument that the Dialogues are not by Gregory at all, making them Pseudo-Gregorian. Clark’s thesis has received a lot of scholarly attention in the past thirty years, notably from Benedictine scholars and scholars of Benedictine monasticism who do not want to see the “Life of St. Benedict” (found in Book 2 of the Dialogues) considered anything other than truly Gregorian. Demacopoulos, however, gives scant attention to the debate. In a footnote he refers to Clark’s thesis as a “misguided solution” and later acknowledges the difficulty that some scholars have in reconciling the Gregory of the Moralia, the Pastoral Rule, and...